To hear him tell it, no one is more tired of war than US president Barack Obama — yet he is warning that combat fatigue must not get in the way of a new US military escapade in the Middle East.
Ironies abound as Obama contemplates US air strikes on Syria, an operation that will show how a president’s early ideas about wielding power can be reshaped by the dilemmas of office.
Once, candidate Obama chastized George W. Bush for a “cowboy” foreign policy, an “imperial” presidency, and for alienating allies and aking the US into war with cooked intelligence.
However, on the cusp of striking Syria, Obama wants Americans to again take on trust intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, despite the CIA’s credibility being poisoned by its botched “slam dunk” case for war in Iraq.
After once promising to go to war only with an international coalition and with backing from Congress, Obama stands almost alone, dumped by the US’ closest ally Britain, and is snubbing the UN and bucking public opinion.
Connoisseurs of incongruity may also note that Obama’s main military ally in the Syrian adventure figures to be France, the target of endless bile from Americans when it rejected Bush’s invitation to help invade Iraq.
Obama has spent two years trying to keep out of Syria, to spare his nation a new Middle East quagmire — but is now being accused of rushing to war — after the administration last week declared that a UN inspection team’s mission there was irrelevant in establishing culpability for a chemical weapons attack.
It is also ironic that a politician who made a career on opposing the Iraq war, finds his efforts to sell a new regional operation complicated by that disastrous conflict.
“Iraq has so fundamentally shattered the trust the American people have in the president when it comes to war and peace that it makes doing the right thing, frankly, much harder,” a former senior Obama national security aide said.
Obama on Friday said he knew Americans were tired of conflict abroad.
“Nobody ends up being more war-weary than me,” said Obama, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.”
However, “Fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility,” US Secretary of State John Kerry added.
The contradictions of the Syrian drama, and the fact that he wants his legacy to be that of a president who got America out of wars, not into new ones, appeared to consume Obama for days.
Aides have repeatedly told journalists that the “president has not made a decision” — styling their boss’s agonizing as the act of a sober leader weighing his not very good options.
Obama has seen his preference for a UN-endorsed mission to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime thwarted by a recalcitrant Russia — and the usual double act with “special relationship”-buddy Britain was sensationally dashed by the House of Commons.
Yet he knows going it alone carries a price.
“There are rules of international law,” Obama said on CNN a week ago. “If the US goes in and attacks another country without a UN mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are question in terms of whether international law supports it,” he said.
A week on, Obama appears to have resolved the dilemma and acknowledged the limits of multilateralism.
“I’ve shown consistently, my strong preference for multilateral action whenever possible,” Obama said on Friday.
Yet the US may also have to act alone if necessary, he said, to enshrine the principle that chemical weapons must not be used in a way that could endanger US allies and national security — and to side with civilians in the path of a war crime.
Benjamin Jensen, an American University political science academic, said US foreign policy since World War II had been dominated by the idea of building a multilateral international diplomatic and economic order.
“President Obama has multiple times indicated his commitment to that kind of liberal internationalist vision,” he said. “That’s where this becomes a real awkward moment if he decides to move forward [on Syria].”
Obama’s credibility is in question because he declared that the use of a “whole bunch” of chemical weapons by al-Assad in the civil war would cross a US red line.
Kerry appeared to implicitly acknowledge that view on Friday, saying the world was watching what the US would do in Syria.
However, he cast the argument wider, saying US foes were judging how Washington reacted to violations of international order.
“They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it ... it is about Iran ... it is about Hezbollah and North Korea,” Kerry said.
So, the ultimate irony may be that Obama may enter a war in Syria, so he does not have to fight one somewhere else.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS